Question 1

Was there once when the Son was not?

Accepted Answer

John answers in his first breath: “In the beginning was the Word” — the Word already was — and “All things were made through him,” which removes him from the category of made things entirely. Jesus prayed to be glorified “with the glory which I had with you before the world existed” (John 17:5). Micah said the Ruler from Bethlehem’s “goings out are from of old, from ancient times” (Micah 5:2) — “from everlasting,” as the KJV renders it. And Hebrews applies Psalm 102, a psalm addressed to Yahweh, directly to the Son: “You, Lord, in the beginning, laid the foundation of the earth” (Hebrews 1:10). The church at Nicaea did not invent a doctrine; it anathematized a sentence Scripture had already contradicted.

Question 2

Was the Son made out of nothing?

Accepted Answer

Hebrews calls the Son “the radiance of his glory, the very image of his substance” (Hebrews 1:3) — radiance is from the light itself, not from nothing. The Father “gave to the Son also to have life in himself” (John 5:26), the very prerogative of God. And the Creator drew the line himself: “I am Yahweh, who makes all things; who alone stretches out the heavens” (Isaiah 44:24) — yet Paul says of the Son, “by him all things were created” (Colossians 1:16), and John that “All things were made through him.” If Yahweh created alone, and the Son created all things, the conclusion is not that there are two creators.

Question 3

A creature — but not like the creatures?

Accepted Answer

That middle category is precisely what Scripture does not have. Paul knows only “the creature” and “the Creator, who is blessed forever,” and condemns those who “worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator” (Romans 1:25). Yet the Father commands, “Let all the angels of God worship him” (Hebrews 1:6), while an angel in Revelation refuses worship with the words “You must not do that! … Worship God” (Revelation 22:9). In heaven’s own liturgy every created thing cries, “To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be the blessing, the honor, the glory, and the dominion” (Revelation 5:13) — the Lamb stands on the receiving side of creation’s worship. There is no shelf between Creator and creature to set him on.

Question 4

Does Proverbs 8:22 make Wisdom — and the Son — a creature?

Accepted Answer

The Hebrew verb is qanah, which the WEB and KJV render “possessed” — “Yahweh possessed me in the beginning of his work” — and the passage is poetry personifying Wisdom, never once quoted of Christ in the New Testament. Even inside the poem the argument fails: one verse later Wisdom says, “I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, before the earth existed” (Proverbs 8:23). A Wisdom from everlasting cannot have been created in time; God was never without his wisdom. Athanasius gave the better part of a book to this verse sixteen centuries ago; its weight has not improved with age.

Question 5

Does “the firstborn of all creation” mean first created?

Accepted Answer

In Scripture “firstborn” is a title of rank before it is a birth order: David, the youngest of Jesse’s sons, is made God’s “firstborn, the highest of the kings of the earth” (Psalm 89:27). Paul seals the meaning himself in the very next sentence: “For by him all things were created in the heavens and on the earth … He is before all things…” (Colossians 1:16-17). The Son is firstborn over creation because he is its maker and heir, not its eldest member — which is why the New World Translation must add “other” four times to make the passage say otherwise. Athanasius answered the Arians from the text itself: if he is firstborn “of the whole creation,” he is other than the whole creation. A text whose own grounding clause makes him the Creator cannot be conscripted to make him a creature.

Question 6

“The Father is greater than I”

Accepted Answer

Jesus spoke these words on the night before the cross, on his way back to the glory he shared with the Father “before the world existed” (John 17:5). Paul gives the shape of the story: “existing in the form of God,” he “emptied himself, taking the form of a servant” (Philippians 2:6-7) — “made a little lower than the angels” for “the suffering of death” (Hebrews 2:9). Greater in position, while the Son stood in the far country of our flesh; not greater in nature, or John could not also record “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30), and that Jesus was “making himself equal with God” (John 5:18). The church never denied the Father’s greatness as Father; it denied that the Son is a different kind of being.

Question 7

The Son does not know the day — so he cannot be God?

Accepted Answer

The same Gospels show both truths without blushing: the boy who “increased in wisdom” (Luke 2:52) is the Lord to whom Peter says, “Lord, you know everything” (John 21:17), and of whom the disciples say, “Now we know that you know all things” (John 16:30); Matthew records that “No one knows the Son, except the Father” (Matthew 11:27) — an exclusive, mutual knowledge no creature could share. The ancient answer is still the best one, and Athanasius gave it from inside the controversy: “as man He knows not; though divinely, being in the Father Word and Wisdom, He knows.” The eternal Son truly took a human mind that learned and grew, without ceasing to be what he was. A Christ whose human mind could not grow or be limited could not genuinely be one of us; a Christ unknowable to all but the Father could not be less than God.

Question 8

Is the Son changeable by nature?

Accepted Answer

Hebrews ends the question in a single line: “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever” (Hebrews 13:8) — and earlier in the same letter puts Psalm 102’s words to Yahweh on the Son: “you are the same. Your years won’t fail” (Hebrews 1:12). Unchangeableness is the line Scripture draws around God alone: “I, Yahweh, don’t change” (Malachi 3:6). Place the Son on the changeable side of that line and Hebrews 1 and 13 must be torn out; leave them in, and Arianism cannot stand.

Question 9

Did Nicaea invent the Son's deity?

Accepted Answer

The receipts run the other way. Early in the second century — two centuries before the council — Ignatius of Antioch, on his way to execution, wrote of “Jesus Christ, our God” and that “our God, Jesus Christ, was … conceived in the womb by Mary.” Thomas had said it first: “My Lord and my God!” (John 20:28). What Nicaea added was not a doctrine but a word — homoousios, “of one substance” — and it needed one precisely because Arians had learned to sign every biblical phrase while meaning a creature. Arius’s own confession to Constantine survives to prove it: it speaks in Scripture’s phrases — “begotten of him before all ages, God the Word through whom all things were made” — yet never says the Son is eternal or of the Father’s substance. Councils do not invent what martyrs were already dying for.

ARIANISM & THE BIBLE

TEST EVERYTHING